If everything is so ephemeral, if labels are illusionary and an after-thought at best, why do I toil so endlessly to create for myself a descriptor? An identity is a label. It identifies me, it represents me, ‘re’-presents me, when I have yet to present myself. I have been spiralling, or at least twirling round on the spot for a rather long time now, trying to put some sort of cohesion into an understanding of who or what I am and simultaneously building an image of who or what I want to be. Build an image. Fabricate an illusion. To what end? To what end and purpose do we ever label things? I believe, as I am sure I have written before, that labels, genres, classes, whatever, render the infinite multiplicities of reality down to a kind of pattern, or more basic entity in order to ease the task of comprehension.

Half the time, maybe all the time, what we call understanding is actually an act of destruction of whatever thing the person is ‘understanding.’ This forcible categorization of an organic, unique entity, to become one of a group of similarly reduced entities is destructive indeed. Rather than examining a thing and understanding its individual characteristics- one will simply look for familiarity -and once found, disregard the rest. In so doing, the fact of the entity’s uniqueness is obsfucated, forgotten, and eliminated.

So why in the hell am I trying to do it to myself? How am I supposed to know who I am when I have yet to stop becoming? I realize I can’t know. An identity is only what I’ve been- what I am is far too fluid. That ephemeral nature of anything applies to me also. Why would I want to distill the life out of me by identifying exactly who I am? I have realized that the quest I’ve been on to find myself runs quite against the spirit of the principles I have established in my writing, in my life. Is it so hard to conceptualize myself as an ever-changing creature? All at once everything I am, I have been, and will be depending on when one takes a look at me. Identity is a tool for after I’m done being. Identity is who I was.

The joy of life is the freedom to change. To give up that freedom by identifying who I am ruins the potential to be anything else. Whether this will make life any easier to live remains to be seen.